When we launched in early 2012, we started with two datacenter regions: NY and Amsterdam. Later, when we released a datacenter in San Francisco, we realized that we were going to run into issues with customers spinning up droplets in different regions from snapshots that were originally taken in a different region. Prior to this change, we were handling the heavy lifting in the background, but the process wasn’t transparent and created extended create times that left users confused. As a result, we’ve broken out the image transfer process into a separate action that customers can now initiate from the Images tab.
On the new images interface, you will now see a Globe Icon - which when clicked will initiate a transfer in the background to copy the specified snapshot to all regions. When the transfer is complete, the Globe icon will be highlighted blue. Once it is completed, you will be able to spin up this image snapshot in any region from the Droplet create page.
We will also be adding this Image Transfer event to the API under the images end-point to allow the same actions to be initiated there as well.
